Tony Abbott has always had a perverse relationship with the truth. Lying is in his nature. It is reaped from his belief in forgiveness.

This is the man who once said, “Misleading the ABC is not quite the same as misleading the parliament.”

It is the same man who said this week, “What happened on January 26, 1788, was, on balance, for everyone, Aboriginal people included, a good thing, because it brought Western civilisation to this country, it brought Australia into the modern world.”

This is the greatest lie ever told by a modern prime minister. It is a lie based on 230 years of deceit. It is a lie about everything, a lie told against thousands and thousands of deaths, against land theft and genocide, against the very foundation of contemporary Australia.

Discourse in our politics is such that this lie goes unpunished by Abbott’s leader. “I’m disappointed by those who want to change the date of Australia Day,” Malcolm Turnbull says, “seeking to take a day that unites Australia and Australians and turn it into one that would divide us.”

Bill Shorten refuses to support change. He says, “I support Australia Day staying on January 26.”

The politics of this is vindictiveness. There is no harm in changing the date, only the embarrassment of admitting that our national day celebrates a dispossession.

Those who cling to January 26 cling to lies. They worry that telling the truth about white settlement will unravel the countless other lies on which structural privilege depends. For them, the world is terrifying.

Those who refuse to change the date hold the fear of Enoch Powell’s whip hand, the belief that engaging with First Australians will see white Australia lose its power. They punish Indigenous Australians with this fear, erasing them from this country’s history.

“All of the things that we know and love about modern Australia,” Abbott says, “are the lineal descendants of the attitudes that came ashore with the First Fleet on that day back in 1788.”

And Turnbull: “A free country debates its history – it does not deny it. It builds new monuments as it preserves old ones, writes new books, not burn old ones.”

This last line is an appalling lie. It does what it purports to condemn, papers over the history it pretends to defend. It is proof of the speciousness of this debate, the complete absence of good faith.

In defending January 26, Tony Abbott quotes Monty Python. His rhetoric is a schoolboy’s. He pictures John Cleese in Life of Brian, asking what the Romans have done for us, apart from bring sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, fresh water, public health. “It’s worth asking the same question of the British settlement of Australia,” he says, “at the same time as we acknowledge the dispossession of the original inhabitants.”

Abbott claims, “There are 364 other days of the year when we can wear a black armband”. And that, “For his time, Governor Phillip was a remarkably humane and enlightened man”.

Abbott redefines what it is to celebrate on January 26. He co-opts it into a kind of national pledge. He says he will “gladly join millions of my fellow Australians to declare my faith in what, to us, is surely the best country on earth”.

This is the classic strategy of a culture war. Conservatives choose a hill and then prepare to die on it. They claim it means something it doesn’t. They know they will lose, so their only real goal is damage. Their fighting never graduates from stalemate and trenches.

This is not about January 26. It is about honesty and a system that depends on its suppression, a system of insincere power and ill-gotten privilege. Changing that system – being honest and changing the date – is the only way this country will start a candid exchange with the future.

Tony Abbott’s bombast will not survive that future, but the rest of us will. We shouldn’t wait.

changedate.com.au

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
Jan 27, 2018 as "Between the lies".
Subscribe here.

Mike Seccombe
After two High Court decisions, the fight against federal funding for religious-only school chaplains is set to end with a test case on state anti-discrimination law.You can’t pay someone to break the law, which is what the Victorian government is now doing. And they can’t say, ‘Well, the federal government is paying us to break the law.’

Kate Iselin
The Victorian Liberal Party’s state council has, ahead of this year’s election, endorsed the ‘Nordic model’ to transform sex work laws, but European experiences suggest it can have devastating consequences for workers.

Rebecca Harkins-Cross
She’s a writer whose plays have been widely lauded by critics but largely neglected by the mainstream. Now Patricia Cornelius’s work will take its place on the main stage. “It sounds so hifalutin, but my ambition was really just to be able to create great work … that I felt soared. It never entered my mind that it would happen in the mainstream.”

Annie Smithers
I came across this recipe some years ago and it has become my favourite to move on to once I’m over the ‘sweet’ quince thing. It features Persian overtones, Moroccan influences and rich flavours that are perfect as the nights get colder.

Guy Rundle
The massive expansion of the tertiary sector during the Dawkins era, and the elision of tech institutes and universities, set us off on the wild ride we are still on. Resistance by the humanities was greeted with exemplary punishment – the cheapest courses to teach, they were crowded with tens of thousands of new students and deprived of the funding to cater for them. The problem is worse in Australia than almost anywhere else. Had we a real respect for universities and what they do, the successive depredation of them would have given us a May ’68 redux by now. Instead, the machine hums on.

Paul Bongiorno
The fact is Labor senator Katy Gallagher referred herself to the High Court as a test case for “reasonable steps”. Turnbull’s attack on Shorten for gaming the system is very rich given he argued that Barnaby Joyce was eligible until the court declared otherwise. Joyce remained deputy prime minister and sat in the parliament for 74 days even though he was under a cloud. There is no real substance to the demands that the members now facing the voters again should apologise for the inconvenience and expense the byelections will cost. In all their cases, their good faith is established by their genuine efforts to comply with section 44, according to serious legal advice, which was clearly not the case with the politicians who were bundled out of the parliament last year.

Richard Ackland
This week Gadfly thinks it’s high time to unload some festering snipes and snarls. Take the Australian Press Council as a starting point. The press “regulator” is in the process of rissoling the Indigenous woman Carla McGrath as a public member of the council, on the feeble excuse that her position as deputy chair of GetUp! creates a conflict of interest. What on earth are they on about? The Press Council itself is a conflict of interest, riddled with tired hacks representing their paymasters in the media.

Even the farmers admit it is an increment – the decision by Malcolm Turnbull’s government not to ban live exports over summer, despite evidence of the risk to animals, despite footage of mass deaths and calls from vets to end the trade.The truth is, this is an industry of undue political clout. There are economic arguments against live exports, good ones. There are obvious welfare arguments, too.

Martin McKenzie-Murray
Though the unusual manner in which Aaron Cockman spoke of the alleged murderer of his children and ex-wife – his former father-in-law – was puzzling to many, psychological studies of similar crimes suggest a way to make sense of its seeming contradictions.

Mike Seccombe
After two High Court decisions, the fight against federal funding for religious-only school chaplains is set to end with a test case on state anti-discrimination law.You can’t pay someone to break the law, which is what the Victorian government is now doing. And they can’t say, ‘Well, the federal government is paying us to break the law.’

Kate Iselin
The Victorian Liberal Party’s state council has, ahead of this year’s election, endorsed the ‘Nordic model’ to transform sex work laws, but European experiences suggest it can have devastating consequences for workers.

Rebecca Harkins-Cross
She’s a writer whose plays have been widely lauded by critics but largely neglected by the mainstream. Now Patricia Cornelius’s work will take its place on the main stage. “It sounds so hifalutin, but my ambition was really just to be able to create great work … that I felt soared. It never entered my mind that it would happen in the mainstream.”

Annie Smithers
I came across this recipe some years ago and it has become my favourite to move on to once I’m over the ‘sweet’ quince thing. It features Persian overtones, Moroccan influences and rich flavours that are perfect as the nights get colder.

Guy Rundle
The massive expansion of the tertiary sector during the Dawkins era, and the elision of tech institutes and universities, set us off on the wild ride we are still on. Resistance by the humanities was greeted with exemplary punishment – the cheapest courses to teach, they were crowded with tens of thousands of new students and deprived of the funding to cater for them. The problem is worse in Australia than almost anywhere else. Had we a real respect for universities and what they do, the successive depredation of them would have given us a May ’68 redux by now. Instead, the machine hums on.

Paul Bongiorno
The fact is Labor senator Katy Gallagher referred herself to the High Court as a test case for “reasonable steps”. Turnbull’s attack on Shorten for gaming the system is very rich given he argued that Barnaby Joyce was eligible until the court declared otherwise. Joyce remained deputy prime minister and sat in the parliament for 74 days even though he was under a cloud. There is no real substance to the demands that the members now facing the voters again should apologise for the inconvenience and expense the byelections will cost. In all their cases, their good faith is established by their genuine efforts to comply with section 44, according to serious legal advice, which was clearly not the case with the politicians who were bundled out of the parliament last year.

Richard Ackland
This week Gadfly thinks it’s high time to unload some festering snipes and snarls. Take the Australian Press Council as a starting point. The press “regulator” is in the process of rissoling the Indigenous woman Carla McGrath as a public member of the council, on the feeble excuse that her position as deputy chair of GetUp! creates a conflict of interest. What on earth are they on about? The Press Council itself is a conflict of interest, riddled with tired hacks representing their paymasters in the media.

Even the farmers admit it is an increment – the decision by Malcolm Turnbull’s government not to ban live exports over summer, despite evidence of the risk to animals, despite footage of mass deaths and calls from vets to end the trade.The truth is, this is an industry of undue political clout. There are economic arguments against live exports, good ones. There are obvious welfare arguments, too.

Martin McKenzie-Murray
Though the unusual manner in which Aaron Cockman spoke of the alleged murderer of his children and ex-wife – his former father-in-law – was puzzling to many, psychological studies of similar crimes suggest a way to make sense of its seeming contradictions.